The Mountains Are the Original Text



Every living thing begins in darkness. Creation is not a command—it’s a contraction. Light doesn’t appear until something opens.

For most of my career, I’ve tried to teach from that place of opening—the slow widening of perception that happens when someone realizes science isn’t about control, but about relationship. The same is true for theology. Both are disciplines of attention, and both go wrong when we forget that attention requires humility.

I’ve seen this truth bloom in unlikely places: a community garden in Cleveland where seventeen languages mixed with the smell of soil; a refugee job training classroom where trauma stories and botany lessons shared the same oxygen; a high school gym full of teenagers learning that watershed maps aren’t just data—they’re biographies of the land. Every time, the question underneath is the same: Can we learn to see the world as a body, not a machine?

Environmental education and trans liberation sound like distant subjects, but they share a single grammar. Both refuse to accept that deviation means error. Both insist that transformation is not loss. Both begin with the same confession: what we’ve inherited isn’t fixed, and what we become isn’t betrayal.

When I imagine teaching in the Rockies, I don’t picture lecturing about glaciers. I picture walking beside one, asking students what they notice about its patience. A glacier doesn’t just melt; it metabolizes time. It reshapes the world slowly, insistently, beautifully. So do we.

The mountains are the original text—older than scripture, earlier than empire. They teach without permission. They remind us that theology, ecology, and pedagogy are not separate languages but dialects of the same truth: everything alive is in transition.

If I’ve learned anything from twenty years of youth work, it’s this: you can’t teach transformation abstractly. You have to live it. You have to risk showing that your own body, your own story, is part of the curriculum. That’s why I keep teaching. That’s why I keep writing. Because if the divine really is embodied, then every lesson is an incarnation—and every student, like the earth itself, is a new draft of creation still being revised.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Conscious Policy for Unconscious Systems: Precaution, Power, and Transatlantic Drift in the Age of AI

Image
Executive Synthesis – 2025 In 2001, I wrote that the starkest difference between Europe and the United States could be seen from the air: Paris ringed by farms, New York by sprawl. Underneath that visual was a deeper contrast—how each society approached uncertainty, risk, and public interest through policy. A quarter century later, the divergence remains—but the stakes have grown far stranger. Europe’s approach to regulation has long been guided by the precautionary principle —a framework that allows policy to intervene in the face of scientific uncertainty to prevent potential harm. Whether in agriculture, pharmaceuticals, or environmental health, European law prioritizes a “better safe than sorry” ethos, even when risks are not fully understood. In contrast, the United States typically employs a risk-based model, requiring conclusive evidence of harm before regulatory action is taken. The burden of proof falls not on innovators, but on those harmed. This transatlantic divergence,...
Read more

California

Image
Low and Slow: A Cat-Friendly, Soulful Road Trip to the California Coast Summer 2025 — With Pit Stops for Yoga, Surfing, Volunteering, and the Dead Overview Launching in early June, I’ll be meandering westward with my cat, my tent, and a spirit of curiosity. This low-altitude, slow-travel route avoids major mountain passes, prioritizes cooler mornings and shaded, scenic campsites. The goal? Arrive in San Francisco by August 1 for the Dead & Company 60th Anniversary shows—then continue north toward Ocean Shores, Washington. 🧭 Priorities Low-Altitude & Heat-Aware: Beat desert heat with early departures and flexible pacing. Cat Comfort First: Shaded trails, secure camp setups, cool-down routines. Free or Low-Cost: Dispersed camping, BLM land, and affordable rest stops. Spiritual Recharge: Visiting Kundalini Yoga centers for meditation, reflection, or short seva stays. Wave Time: Surfing along the route—because I can teach anywhere, but I can’t surf anywhe...
Read more

The Knife in the Drawer

Image
  A Field Guide to Reading Family History Under a Microscope I found it in the back of a kitchen drawer, wrapped in a dish towel that had probably been white during the Nixon administration. The knife was heavy. Not awkward—deliberate. The blade was still sharp enough to split a tomato without a whisper. The handle was cracked but solid, warm in the hand the way old tools are. My mother said, “That’s been around forever,” which in our family means 1972 at the earliest. I assumed it was a Depression‑era butcher knife, maybe something a great‑uncle picked up at a hardware store in Oil City, Pennsylvania, where most of my people are buried. I was wrong by more than a century. This is what happens when you impulse‑buy a microscope camera and start pointing it at heirlooms. Objects stop being sentimental and start being legible. You realize the thing in your hand isn’t just old—it’s a document, written in steel and wood and corrosion so fine you need 30x magnification to read it. The Bl...
Read more